Minecraft, a Documentary

I don’t play video games very often, but I did once watch someone herd severely pixelated sheep through a severely pixelated landscape to be sheared for gigantic blocks of the “right” shade white which were then used to line the walls of “an art gallery” inside a Minecraft world.

Five hours later, I was like, what just happened?

Finally, there’s a documentary about the highly addictive, labor-intensive, possibility-rich indie game Minecraft.

Launched in 2009 by Markus “Notch” Persson, the “part exploratory adventure, part creative building tool” became a hit, a cult favorite and a blockbuster, pixel brick by pixel brick. The feature-length documentary follows Notch’s Mojang’s company’s first year. With industry pros (Peter Molyneux, Tim Schafer), journalists, and VIP players — Yogscast, The Shaft, Minecraft Teacher — the film is in the vein of that great recent docIndie Game, but no one says that if they don’t finish making Fez in two weeks they will kill himself, literally, kill himself. That was scary.

“And yes, that is a skellington riding a spider.” If you don’t get it, you don’t get.

The other day, while I was at work, my sister stole my iPad and tested to see if it can survive
a forty foot drop, just so she can be a youtube
sensation. My iPad is now destroyed and she has 83 views.